How to fix a broken Congress

There were plenty of reasons to be somber Sunday. Remembering the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks a decade ago and honoring the lives lost and communities shattered were foremost among them. But for many of us, there was also the worrying sense that, although we might be safer today, we are not as strong a nation as we would hope.

Americans believe we are adrift, saddled with a political system that is ineffective at addressing the challenges that beset us. Congress, in particular, has lost the faith of its constituents. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, its approval rating jumped above 80 percent. Now, according to a mid-August Gallup Poll, that figure stands at an abysmal 13 percent, while public disapproval has reached a historic high of 84 percent. To borrow a term from the housing meltdown, Congress is deeply underwater.

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It badly needs to resurface — and do so on its own merits. It should not require an attack on our shores to boost its public standing.

Regaining public esteem will demand changes in both its practices and its understanding of itself. It has been years since Congress acted as if it took seriously its responsibility, as the separate and coequal branch of government envisioned in the Constitution, to make the country work. Yet that is precisely how it needs to behave at this moment.

There’s no single magic bullet in this regard, just a series of changes to carry out. The first set is procedural — efforts to remove the roadblocks to institutional effectiveness. They will not be easy. But Congress has gotten its house in order before, and it can do it again.

The filibuster rule, nowhere enacted into law, now effectively requires 60 votes in the Senate in order to move most legislation, a formidable hurdle in the closely divided chamber. And in the name of efficiency, Congress routinely embraces giant omnibus bills that allow congressional leaders basically to undermine the deliberation, transparency and accountability we expect and need in our system. A return to the regular order developed by Congress over many decades would be central to improving its operations.

The country also needs more robust congressional oversight into every nook and cranny of government and a vigorous ethics system that enforces the basic rule that every member act in such a manner as to reflect credit on the institution.

A Congress seriously interested in effectiveness would pursue procedural fixes to reduce the excessive partisanship that too often paralyzes Capitol Hill. None of them are mysterious: redressing the outsize role of special-interest money in elections, reducing partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, eliminating closed state primaries that enable ideological activists to dominate elections and wringing the intense partisanship of committee staffers out of the legislative process.

These “process” solutions only skirt a deeper problem, though. Congress is struggling to define itself as an institution. Our founders envisioned it as a coequal branch of government, with the elevated standing both to critique and to form a partnership with the executive in making this nation strong and effective. Congress needs to live up to that constitutional role.

How? I believe Congress needs to think of itself as a pragmatic problem-solver, a voice for a diverse nation and a searcher for the common good.

The noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote that at heart, politics is about “the search for remedy” — finding a way to fix the problems that beset us. None of our challenges — not the debt ceiling, not the economy, not our entanglements overseas nor our growing inequalities back home — are insurmountable. But they do require politics at its best: an honest effort to find remedies that are fair and lasting.